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The weekend masterclass develops facilitation skills and is aimed at anyone who is involved in training, development and educating others.
Facilitation skills are vital in any event that involves creating a safe space for collaboration where people are interacting and discussing ideas to promote change.
The workshops explore the use of participatory approaches to professional development such as team building, gaining participants’ trust, maximizing engagement and fostering collaboration and personal disclosure.
The workshops are based on the premise that facilitation skills requires ‘presence’ and involves managing the physical, mental and emotional engagement of the participants.
The workshops also explore the use of community forums in personal and professional development. The workshops are adapted from techniques used in Forum Theatre devised by the Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal.
Participants will learn the methodology and practice the techniques so after the programme they can apply these methods in their own contexts. This methodology provides an innovative framework for conducting professional development in institutions. It is participant centered and the issues are real concerns and challenges that participants face, while providing a safe space to frame the reflections and discussions. The methodology generates multi-voiced, multi-perspectival dialogue and is focused on finding solutions to real problems and inspiring action and change.
Led by Daniel Foley, a professional actor, who has performed in 64 countries worldwide; his one-man shows have received critical acclaim and he is the founding member of his current theatre company “Performance Exchange.” The workshop includes techniques used by professional actors to project, modulate and develop their voice.
Daniel Foley is a well-known Shakespearean specialist. His one man show brings alive all areas of Shakespearean Drama, from the tragic and macabre to the comic and historic with scenes from “Romeo and Juliet”, “Macbeth”, “Hamlet”, “The Tempest”, amongst others, with significant aplomb and participation of members of the audience. Highlights include impersonations of Marlon Brando and John Wayne taking on Shakespearean roles and an insight into some of the techniques used in hand and sword fighting on the stage. Daniel also shares his knowledge of Elizabethan theatre and tests the audience’s knowledge through an interactive quiz.
Developing Facilitation Skills for Trainers and Educators
Face to face courses at ITI Istanbul.
The course develops advanced facilitation skills and is aimed at anyone who is involved in training, development and educating others. Facilitation skills are vital in any event that involves creating a safe space for collaboration where people are interacting and discussing ideas to promote change. The workshops explore the use of participatory approaches to professional development such as team building, gaining participants’ trust, maximizing engagement and fostering collaboration and personal disclosure and simultaneously develops a range of many other performative skills. The workshops are structured on tried and proven methodology adapted from the participatory arts and used for training in community settings, care homes, hospitals and many institutions focusing on personal and professional development.
Participants will receive a certificate at the end of the course.
These series of workshops explore the use of community forums in personal and professional development. The workshops are adapted from techniques used in Forum Theatre devised by the Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal.
Participants will learn the methodology and practice the techniques so after the programme they can apply these methods in their own contexts. This methodology provides an innovative framework for conducting professional development in institutions. It is participant (or company) centered (the issues are real concerns and challenges), while providing a safe space to frame the reflections and discussions. The methodology generates multi-voiced, multi-perspectival dialogue and is focused on finding solutions to real problems and inspiring action and change.
This paper is based on a series of diagnostic workshops conducted at a teacher training centre in Istanbul focusing on how participatory methodology can inform ELT Teacher Education. The workshops provided participants experience of participatory methodology and techniques to elicit feedback on their pedagogic value and efficacy in Teacher Education. Through dialogue and reflection, participants identify the facilitation skills they value from the workshops. While participatory methodology has a long and proven track record in Applied Theatre, education and development, it is rarely utilized in teacher development programmes. In particular we explored the use of Community Forums (an adaption of Forum Theatre) in which participants re-enact collectively experienced challenges in order to find solutions. Feedback from the workshops reveals that Community Forums provide participant-led, solution-oriented, multiple voiced opportunities for reflection and dialogue on critical incidents teachers’ face. Additionally, the workshops aim to initiate transformational change by developing participants’ facilitation skills. The research provides the initial diagnostic data to create teacher development programmes incorporating Community Forums and participatory methods.
1 Introduction.
Having just attended a series of professional workshops I am struck by a worrying paradox. Most ELT trainers and educators, while advocating lessons that are personalised, learner-centred and focus on communication and language use; in practice deliver training sessions that are tutor-centred, material driven (invariably structured by power point slides) that appear to aim primarily at the transmission of content. If trainers and educators do not set an example of how to encourage participatory learning, it is hardly surprising then that teachers often pay lip service to the concept of ‘facilitating learning’ while in reality they are stuck in the traditional conception of a teacher as a transmitter of information. We sorely need a framework and structured methodology for participant-led, solution-oriented professional development workshops.
One solution may lie in the methodology provided by the participatory arts. Participatory arts provide a form of expression which enables shared ownership of decision-making processes and aims to generate dialogue, reflection, and community cohesion. Adapting the principles and rationale of Forum Theatre I explored the use of participatory methodology (and Commubnity Forums in particular) for teacher professional development in a series of workshops at a teacher training centre in Istanbul. Community Forums are an adaptation of Forum Theatre which was developed by the Brazilian educator, dramatist, director Augusto Boal in 1973. Rooted in the Brazilian social movements of the 1950s and 1960s and based on Paolo Freire’s model of participatory education, it is designed to represent experiences of social and political oppression in order to stimulate community dialogue and problem-solving. Over 50 years later Forum Theatre has been shown to work successfully across a remarkable range of cultural, political, and social differences and demands. It has been used by peasants and workers, students and teachers, artists, social workers, psychotherapists, and NGOs, among others; in schools, streets, churches, hospitals, theatres, and prisons.
Community Forums can be seen as a methodology for generating both the participants’ understanding of their situation and the actions to improve them so, in other words, it provides both the content (problems) and the methods to interrogate reflection and elicit solutions. The procedure is relatively straight forward and easy for a novice facilitator to follow after basic training. Participants (teachers in our case) are invited to brainstorm and recall crtiical incidents from their experience of challenges / problems they have faced in their work and then share experiences with each other prior to re-enacting the scenarios in groups in order to reflect and diagnose solutions and alternative courses of action. Having investigated and rehearsed a number of scenarios, these then can be scaled up to a wider community by presenting them to an audience and inviting them to discuss and offer alternative solutions. The workshops aim at the education, personal growth and skills development of the participants as well as providing a diagnostic exploration of the efficacy of applying community forums in a professional development setting.
3 Objectives
My specific objectives for the workshops are fourfold.
1. Diagnostic: To provide an opportunity to experience community forums and to elicit participant-led feedback on their efficacy for teacher education.
2. Methodologic: Related to the above, to evaluate whether the methodology is appropriate and effective in teacher education settings (does it do what it claims to do).
3. Pedagogic: To elicit through dialogue and reflection what participants have learned from the workshops.
4. Transformational: To initiate action or change by providing opportunities to develop facilitation skills for participants to utilize in their own settings.
4 Procedure
The workshops were structured according to two components:
A.) Games and participatory activities and B). Community Forum interrogating the challenges of being an ELT teacher and eliciting creative solutions
A. Games and participatory activities.
The activities are designed to build and/or develop most, if not all, of the following:
The workshop structure relies on participation. Firstly, the workshops are built on the participants’ personal narratives and experiences. Sharing personal stories can be a powerful way of promoting teacher development through the sharing of experiences (McCabe 2002). Secondly it is inherently educational as the reflective and interactive processes promote self-aware, critically thinking participants. It encourages a ‘bottom up’ approach to change that is advocated in much literature on educational innovation and change (Fullan 2007).
The three (3 hour) workshops followed this format.
Workshop 1. Tilling the Soil.
Participants warm up to the concept of self-disclosure through activities in pairs and groups. Then we brainstorm the rewards of teaching before relating a story of positive achievement in groups which provides the stimulus for re-enacting the story through image theatre. In the final hour we repeated the cycle but this time brainstorming – challenges, obstacles, difficulties, and concerns of an ELT teacher.
Workshop 2. ‘Sowing the Seeds’
Participants focus on devising scenes for the community forum scenario. By the end of the workshop we have six scenes and a facilitator/ director allocated to each scene.
Stage 3 ‘Blooming’
Participants focus on developing facilitation skills and rehearsing the forum scenes. The scenarios are pressented to an audience in the Community Forum. The forum aims to stimulate discussion, reflection and debate amongst the audience who are also invited to participate in the search for solutions to the issues raised.
5 Findings and participant feedback
5.1 Real experiences / challenges
The aim of the community forum was to raise awareness and interrogate the challenges that teachers face and to explore solutions. After the first workshop I categorized these challenges into four groups for ease of reference:
1. Internal challenges (self-doubts, moods, energy levels, lack of confidence / knowledge)
2. External challenges (from administration, management, learners, parents and colleagues)
3. Contextual challenges (low pay, large classes, inappropriate methodology and materials)
4. Cultural challenges (poor communication, long hours, cultural differences)
When planning the workshops, I was concerned that the scenarios presented to the audience would lack authenticity. However, these comments suggest otherwise:
‘It shows the challenges of a teacher. It is nice to know you are not alone experiencing these kind of problems’
‘It mirrors real situations and presents them visually’.
Indeed, one audience member embodied the experience:
‘In the beginning I was so tense and I felt I was exactly the same as Asya (the protagonist), I even felt blank in the first 10 seconds after the show was over. Felt frustrated but then I started thinking how I could help her… things changed. I started to feel more confident. I could think outside the box again. I felt relieved.’
At the end of the second workshop one participant recognized that time and iteration are necessary for depth and wrote: ‘I believe this kind of training will be more ‘fruitful’ if done several times. I mean problems to focus on will get more challenging and therefore the issues raised will be more thought provoking.’
5.2 Metaxis / dramatic distance.
Participants noted that re-enacting the fiction provided space for reflection. Boal (1995, p.43) refers to the term metaxis to describe the idea of living in an imaginary world which creates a dialectic between fiction and reality so knowledge acquired in the fictional world is transferable to the real world through imaginative play. The benefits of drama to provide ‘distance’ was mentioned by participants as in these examples: ‘I think they open some doors and give perspective about real life problems. Watching other people and seeing the problems acted provides a distance from the problem. So I can think better to find a solution.’
When dramatizing critical incidents participants experience a condition of in-between-ness, a liminal space between reality and fiction. This duality creates both tension and imaginative possibilities that are crucial elements in a training context. Through imagining what it might be like to be another, at the same time as being themselves, participants experience ‘me/not me’ (Schechner, 1985). Transformative theories of learning (Mezirow, 1997) propose that learning occurs when the participant faces a challenge, either an accumulation of experiences over time or a sudden trauma. The state of disequilibrium triggers reflection and critical assessment.
5.3 Reflection and Dialogue.
When prompted to consider the benefits for professional development two comments from the audience included:
‘Confidence, talking about the issues via fictional characters makes people feel better (a bit of therapy) becoming more aware of what happens in their schools’.
‘Imagined situations may be perceived as less confrontational’
Each scenario in our performance highlighted problematic issues involving our teacher protagonist facing challenges. At the end of the event, we had a feedback discussion in which the audience reflected on the experience.
5.4 Participant-led.
By delegating content creation to the workshop participants, the conventional power discrepancy is overturned allowing for participant centred input. This flexibility in facilitation allows for creation of a zone of proximal development for the participants and shifts the responsibility for learning from the facilitator to the participants (Vygotsky, 1986). The zone of proximal development is a concept introduced by Vygotsky to describe the space between ‘not able to do’ and ‘able to do’. In this space participants seek solutions with support from the audience.
One key objective of the workshops is to assess their pedagogic value. One factor that emerged was that as the content was participant led, this allowed space for creativity. One participant commented: ‘It was lovely watching the things that were crafted by people, from nothing‘.
5.5 Change and transformation
A key aspect of the methodology is the degree of change and transformation of the participants. In the final workshop I invited participants to comment on how the workshops assisted in their professional development. Many comments referred to the methodology itself; ‘Creating alternative solutions, scenarios, paths of experience’; ‘Exploring issues that concern teachers can clarify things and help find solutions;’ Many participants commented on the relationship between challenge and enjoyment: ‘It was scary at first, but then, it was fun’. In terms of learning and development there is a need for challenge, as Sawyer (1999) highlights: ‘Change is always connected to the willingness to take risks in going beyond what is known and familiar’.
5.6 Scalability
One key advantage of community forums in terms of teacher development is that the procedure can be scaled up to involve large numbers of participants in a short time period. Simply by training an initial modest cohort of 12 community forum facilitators, if these facilitators subsequently conduct workshops for a further 12 participants and then present their community forums to audiences of 200 teachers, within a limited period more than 2,500 teachers will have been exposed to the issues and had an opportunity to discuss and generate solutions. The forums can be expanded to include other stakeholders such as School Principals, learners, and parents. In addition the impact of the forums in terms of audience responses and committment to finding solutions is visible. The forum can be filmed and/ or audience feedback obtained to provide tangible evidence of impact to sponsors.
5.7 Limitations
One audience member recognised that a representative range of stakeholders are needed to have a genuine interrogation of the issues: ‘Through these workshops we can actually educate heads of department, principals of schools, managers and even teacher trainers in order to create a healthier working environment.’
When asked whether institutions would be interested in professional development using Community Forums there was a mixed response. ‘The institutions are interested in making money. I think they don’t care for using professional development that needs a lot of time and costs a lot maybe’.
‘Here is the point, sometimes people prefer the old-fashioned techniques (books, homework and old rules) so they are not accepting new things.’
6 Conclusion
Community Forums operate at the facilitative, open end of the teaching / training continuum and therefore are liable to elicit more fervent participant responses, interaction and dialogue. Community Forums epitomise an interactionist, participatory approach to learning espousing the philosophy that the process of meaningful dialogue and interaction and the flow of ideas is where learning occurs.
We can conclude by revisiting our initial objectives for the workshops.
1. Diagnostic.
The workshops generated reflection and discussion that provided valuable information about participants perspectives of Community Forums and its relevance to their development as teachers.
2. Methodology.
Despite some limitations, such as potential lack of acceptance by institutions and other stakeholders, we can conclude that Community Forums provide participant-led, authentic content to generate solution oriented interventions, reflection, and dialogue of lived experience as well as offering a safe, fictional distance to encourage personal disclosure and multiple perspectives.
3. Pedagogic
Participants identified numerous facilitation skills that emerged primarily through the games and activities. The methodology provides participants opportunities to develop facilitation skills of raising their awareness of self, others and reflect on their beliefs, behaviour and feelings. These facilitation skills are rarely addressed in teacher education where the focus is primarily on a cognitive, instrumental orientation rather than towards a performative-humanistic understanding of “teaching and learning with head, heart, hands, and feet” (Schewe, 2013, p. 7).
4. Transformational
My aim in conducting the workshops is to stimulate action and change. The workshops are a pilot project to explore the efficacy of Community Forums and how to develop the skills of facilitators who can then disseminate the methodology. After my initial diagnostic workshops I have created two short courses: 1) A week intensive training to develop facilitator skills; 2) Three (3 hour) workshops leading to a Community Forum (see Appendix A). The overall aim is to introduce teachers to a range of techniques to raise awareness of the participatory arts in general and the us of community forums in particular and reveal a fresh landscape of creative personalised expression, enjoyment and gratification.
Works Cited
Boal, A., 1995. The rainbow of desire: the Boal method of theatre and therapy. Routledge, London; New York.
Freire, P., 1995. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, New York.
Fullan, M., 2007. The new meaning of educational change, 4th ed. ed. Teachers College Press, New York.
Mezirow, J., 1997. Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing , Volume 1997, pp. 5 – 12.
McCabe, A., 2002. A Wellspring for development. IATEFL Publications 82–96.
Schechner, R., 1985. Between theatre and anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Schewe, M., 2013. Taking stock and looking ahead: Drama pedagogy as a gateway for performative. Scenario: Journal for Performative Teaching, Learning and Research, Volume 8, pp. 5 – 23.
Vygotsky, L., 1986. Thought and language. Cambridge, Massachucetts: MIT.
7. Appendix
Developing Facilitation Skills for Trainers and Educators
These series of workshops explore the use of community forums in personal and professional development. The workshops are adapted from techniques used in Forum Theatre devised by the Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal.
Participants will learn the methodology and practice the techniques so after the programme they can apply these methods in their own contexts. This methodology provides an innovative framework for conducting professional development in institutions. It is participant (or company) centered (the issues are real concerns and challenges), while providing a safe space to frame the reflections and discussions. The methodology generates multi-voiced, multi-perspectival dialogue and is focused on finding solutions to real problems and inspiring action and change.
Identifying Performative and Meta-Performative Skills pertinent to Teacher Development.
This article is based on a series of diagnostic workshops conducted at a teacher training centre in Istanbul focusing on how Performative Pedagogy can inform Teacher Education. Performative Pedagogy provides embodied, participant-led, solution-oriented, multiple voiced opportunities for reflection and dialogue on critical incidents teachers’ face. In addition, participants highlighted a number of performative skills pertaining to developing awareness of self, others and setting that are fundamentally ignored in current competence-based teacher education programmes. Finally participants uncovered meta-performative skills revealing aspects of their identity and reflection on why teachers act in the way that they do.
Background to the workshops
I work in a teacher training centre in Istanbul training pre-service and in-service teachers from a spectrum of cultures and linguistic backgrounds. The environment demands self-aware, reflective teachers who are collaborative, demonstrate inter and intra-personal qualities, adaptable, able to embrace diversity in multi-cultural and multi-linguistic contexts while solving emergent problems, adopting a range of roles and in most cases having to perform in a language which is not their mother tongue. Typically, the teacher education they receive focusses on cognitive, instrumental and propositional knowledge leaving them often feeling ill-equipped, disillusioned and ill-prepared to meet the behavioral challenges of teaching a class in situ. To fill this gap, I have turned to performative pedagogy and to an examination of its applicability to teacher education.
Performative approaches to learning demands skills that combine physical, cognitive and affective domains. Teaching is performative in that it is based on judgements formed through action (heuristic); it is influenced by contingencies that happen in real time and are unpredictable (improvised); it involves physical and emotional engagement (embodied) and learning is created in the process (emergent). “Teachers are taught how to instruct but not how to engage their students emotionally”. (Wahl, 2011, p. 21).
Post pandemic it is opportune to consider the importance of the embodied physical presence of learners and teachers in the learning encounter as this raises fundamental issues as to the nature of teaching and learning. Teachers are rarely trained in skills to assist them to be physically present, emotionally aware and able to improvise creatively to emergent needs. The potential of embodied methodologies and the need to acquire performative skills is ignored in teacher education which remains firmly entrenched in a competence driven paradigm. Metaphorically teacher education provides ‘the map’ (the official version of the journey route) but omits ‘the story’ (the feelings of the journey’s experience).
Research on teacher education has moved somewhat from defining what a teacher is, does or believes to a more ‘bottom up’ perspective of examining how teachers learn (Allwright 2001). Despite a move to more teacher introspection, teacher education is still rooted to the assumption that teachers need core disciplinary knowledge (Yates and Muchisky 2003) and knowledge of pedagogic skills which will be moulded into expertise through classroom experience. In contrast the underlying philosophy behind performative pedagogy is that there is a direct relationship between affective, cognitive and physical domains so we need to ‘feel’ something as well as understand it. Vygotsky refers to ‘perezvanhie’ a Russian term meaning ‘learning through experience’. In other words, we need to experience the state of confusion (liminality), a state of being in limbo between knowing and not knowing, before transformation is possible. Development is conceptualized as participatory, action oriented, holistic and requires a performative-humanistic understanding of ‘teaching and learning with head, heart, hands and feet’ (Schewe, 2013).
Definition of Performative.
The term ‘performative’ was first coined by Austin in 1962 to refer to a limited set of verbs that both describe and require the performance of the act simultaneously: ‘I name this ship Titanic’. The term was picked up 20 years later by Postmodern thinkers (Derrida, Habermas, Bourdieu) who re-defined ‘performativity’ to include any iterative action that involves social interaction and presence (embodied), indeed any action that involves people coming together to communicate meanings and affirm cultural and social values (i.e. protest marches, sports events, political rallies, concerts). Today with the advent of Performance Studies performativity has a wide remit encompassing gender, race and has opened up significant ways for rethinking language and identity.
Features of Performative Pedagogy.
Performance pedagogy has evolved from ‘drama in education’ (pioneered by Heathcote in the 1960s) and is inherently participant centred. The key characteristics are role playing, improvisation, context specific topics and reflection and discussion on the part of the participants. Like Heathcote, the dramatist Augusto Boal’s philosophy (as depicted in his book ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’) involves learning through re-enactment of scenarios but differs in that learning starts with an awareness and analysis of the present context (oppressions) and involves re-enactment and reflection to uncover solutions and promote action/ change. Boal’s methodology is indebted to his mentor the pedagogue Freire who foregrounds the movement of powerless (oppressed) people from being acted upon (objects) to initiating action and becoming subjects of their own lives. For Freire this process of ‘conscientization’ is dependent on replacing the banking system of education (filling learners with the academy’s version of knowledge) with a dialogic approach to learning. So, while Freire broke the hierarchical divide between teacher and student, Boal did so between performer and audience and by extension performative pedagogy conducts a similar dismantling of the positioning of Teacher and Teacher Educator.
The Findings
These workshops, by identifying the performative and meta-performative skills required by teachers contributes to both the participants’ personal development as well as informing Teacher Education in general. No doubt that becoming more aware of who you are and where you are going is key to professional development. Teachers share experiences and commonalities, become more comfortable with personal disclosure, and come to experience and enjoy a new level of articulation and self-efficacy.
Workshop Objectives
1. Diagnostic.
The workshops generated a lot of written data, oral reflection and discussion that provided valuable information about participants perspectives of Performative Pedagogy and how it is relevant to their development as teachers.
2. Methodology.
Performative Pedagogy provides participant-led, authentic content to generate solution oriented, embodied interventions, reflection, and dialogue of lived experience as well as offering a safe dramatic, fictional distance to encourage personal disclosure and multiple perspectives.
3. Pedagogic
Participants identified numerous performative and meta-performative skills that emerged primarily through the workshop activities. The methodology provides participants opportunities to develop performative skills of raising their awareness of self, others and their context and reflect on their beliefs, behaviour and feelings while performing the activities (meta-performative).
4. Transformational
There is a need for training in performative methods and for educational practices to understand the potential of the arts in transforming consciousness, refining the senses, and enlarging the imagination, and requiring teachers with awareness of performative skills. Performative Pedagogy introduces teachers to a range of techniques to raise awareness of the performative and reveal a fresh landscape of creative embodied expression, enjoyment and gratification.
References
Allwright, R, 2001. Three major processes of teacher development and the appropriate design criteria for developing and using them, in: Research and Practice in Language Teacher Education: Voices from the Field. CARLA, Minneapolis, pp. 115–134.
Schewe, M., 2013. Taking Stock and Looking Ahead: Drama Pedagogy as a Gateway to a Performative Teaching and Learning Culture. Scenario 2013.
Yates, R., Muchisky, D., 2003. On Reconceptualizing Teacher Education. TESOL Quarterly 37, 135.
Wahl, S., 2011. Learning to teach by treading the boards. In Key Concepts in Theatre/Drama Education (pp. 19-22).
This is a blog for teachers interested in teacher education, teacher training and development, teaching and learning and related topics. We will be inviting a variety of people to share their experiences on a regular basis – so keep coming back!.
The latest post is by Galina an ITI DELTA student working in Samara, Russia. She describes the three-day ITI Master Classes held at her University. Liz and I had a wonderful time and thank Galina for inviting us and also writing it up for our blog.
I have written the first two posts to get the ball rolling. My first post is about ‘whole person learning’ and explains my personal philosophy that learning should utilise the whole person in terms of stimulating the mind, body and emotions.
My second post is also personal and describes my experiences over the last two years facing cancer. Like staring down from a precipice, confronting our fragile mortality is terrifying, and yet, at the same time by confronting the inevitable, it provides a unique opportunity to perceive from a new and sharper perspective and to learn valuable lessons about the nature of learning and life.
Not all forms of teacher development feel alive. Some feel like information delivery. Others feel like compliance. Very few feel like genuine growth.
Performative pedagogy, and the Community Forum approach that sits within it, offers something different. It reminds us that teacher learning is not linear. It moves in loops. It expands, contracts and grows through repetition, experimentation and shared imagination. It is less about content and more about connection.
More than anything, it is about community.
Over the past few years, I have seen how teachers respond when they are invited to engage with their work in embodied, creative and relational ways. When they move beyond talking about their challenges and begin exploring those challenges through story, image and re-enactment. When they stop performing for an evaluator and start rehearsing for reality alongside peers who understand the same daily pressures.
This approach is not simple, and it is not always comfortable. It asks for a shift in mindset.
It asks us to:
• Move from expert-driven delivery to co-created inquiry • Allow space for vulnerability and emotion in professional settings • Build institutional cultures that support participation rather than passive attendance
But the rewards are unmistakable.
When teachers reflect together, act together and imagine together, several things happen:
• They feel genuinely seen and heard • They regain a sense of agency over their practice • They discover solutions that emerge from the group rather than from a slide deck
These moments of shared insight are not small. They often change how teachers relate to learners, to colleagues and to themselves.
What We Have Learned
Across countless workshops and forums, four principles stand out:
Teaching is embodied, relational and performative. Community Forums make space for the full reality of teaching, not just the cognitive side.
Facilitation matters. Effective facilitators create safety, curiosity and collective ownership rather than directing or correcting.
Stories, images and re-enactments reveal what discussion alone cannot. They allow us to understand our dilemmas at a deeper and more emotional level.
Learning is most powerful when it is social and sustained. A community of practice is not an optional extra. It is the engine of growth.
Looking Ahead
The practices described here are not step-by-step instructions. They are adaptable frameworks that you can reshape for your own context. Whether you work in a school, a training centre, a university or a community space, performative pedagogy invites you to rethink your role.
Instead of transmitting information, you become someone who cultivates dialogue. Instead of delivering answers, you help create the conditions for shared insight. Instead of standing at the front, you help hold a circle.
This work is part of a broader shift in education. A shift toward approaches that honour experience, creativity and human connection. A shift that recognises the emotional reality of teaching. A shift that invites teachers to learn in the same meaningful, embodied ways we hope our learners will.
This is not an ending. It is a beginning.
If this resonates with you, consider this an open invitation. The Performative ELT community is a growing global space where teachers explore embodied approaches, share practice, collaborate on research and learn through the same creative processes described here. It is for teachers who want development that feels meaningful, human and alive.
You are warmly welcome to join us and be part of shaping what comes next.
Most professional development asks teachers to talk about their challenges. A Community Forum asks them to show them.
This final phase of the Community Forum process brings everything together. The trust built earlier in the workshop. The honest disclosures. The embodied images. The moments of shared humour and tension. All of it moves into a collective space where teachers explore not only what is happening in their classrooms, but what could happen instead.
This article walks you through the final three stages of the process and how they create a powerful form of collaborative learning.
1. Sowing the Seeds
At this point, teachers have already explored their dilemmas through movement, gesture and image theatre. Now they begin shaping these explorations into very short scenes.
In their small groups, they:
• Devise a brief scenario based on a real professional dilemma • Identify the key conflict and the characters involved • Rehearse and refine the scene • Nominate a facilitator or director to guide the presentation
These scenes are simple. Usually two or three minutes long. They are not meant to be polished mini plays. Their purpose is to provoke questions rather than to give answers. They are intentional snapshots of unfinished situations that teachers recognise instantly. A tense parent meeting. A moment of miscommunication with a colleague. A class that suddenly turns against the plan.
These scenes are the seeds. And they are about to bloom.
2. Blooming: The Community Forum Event
The scenes are then shared with a wider audience. This might be peers, colleagues from other departments or invited guests. The session begins with a clear reminder that this is not for entertainment. It is a shared space for inquiry and experimentation.
The Forum unfolds in three steps:
• Each group performs its scene once without interruption • The facilitator invites the audience to reflect • The audience is then invited to participate in the scene
This is where things come alive. A teacher might step into the role of a stressed parent. Another might replace the teacher in the scene and attempt a different response. Others might propose an alternative action that changes the flow of events entirely.
As scenes are replayed, the group begins to see how small behavioural shifts can transform the emotional tone of a difficult moment. The Forum becomes a rehearsal room for real life. Teachers see what happens when someone listens differently, sets a boundary more clearly or responds with curiosity instead of defensiveness.
3. The Facilitator: Holding the Space
The facilitator, or the Joker in Augusto Boal’s original language, ensures that the Forum remains a safe and productive learning space.
They help by:
• Keeping emotional boundaries clear • Reminding everyone of the purpose • Encouraging multiple perspectives • Making sure no single voice dominates
Their role is not to solve the problem. Their role is to help the group explore it with honesty, care and imagination.
The moment the audience begins participating, something shifts. There is no longer a divide between performer and observer. Everyone becomes a spect-actor. Someone who watches, questions and acts. Someone who helps the group see that there are always other ways to respond.
Why This Matters for Teachers
The Community Forum gives teachers a rare opportunity. It lets them examine pressing professional dilemmas with others who truly understand them. It allows them to experiment with responses they might hesitate to try in real life. It builds empathy as teachers step into the shoes of parents, managers, colleagues and learners. And it generates the kind of insight that spoken discussion alone rarely reveals.
Most importantly, the Forum shows teachers that change is possible. Not through a script. Not through a prescribed technique. But through shared creativity and collective intelligence.
And that is the real lesson. The Forum is not the end of the process. It is the beginning. The ideas generated in this space often find their way into classrooms, staff rooms and institutional conversations long after the workshop ends.
When teachers gather not only to talk but to imagine, move, embody and co-create, they discover something important. The challenges they face are real. But so are the possibilities.
Teacher reflection has become a mantra in professional development. But what if reflection just stays trapped in our heads?
Teachers sit in training sessions analysing lessons and discussing what went wrong. They fill out self-evaluation forms, watch their peers, and write action points. Yet the emotional energy that shapes every moment in the classroom often goes untouched.
In reality, change begins not with thinking differently, but with feeling differently.
That’s where Image Theatre and Forum techniques can take us.
I first saw this during a ten-day Theatre for Living workshop led by David Diamond in Cairo. A group of teachers stood in a circle, exploring classroom stories through image and gesture. Within minutes, people who had barely spoken all week were physically expressing power, tension, and empathy without a single word.
They weren’t performing. They were re-feeling their experiences.
Once participants had created still images of real dilemmas, the next step was to animate those images. The moment the frozen picture began to move, everything changed.
The classroom wasn’t an abstract problem anymore. It was right there, breathing in front of us.
Here are six simple but powerful ways to bring this work to life in a classroom or teacher development setting.
1. Stand with a Character
Ask your group: If you have ever felt like one of these people, literally or symbolically, come and stand beside them.
Participants step into the scene, mirroring the pose of the character who resonates most. Then, invite them to speak a single line beginning with:
I want…
I wish…
In seconds, the space fills with quiet truths teachers rarely voice. A participant standing beside a “tired teacher” might whisper, I wish someone saw how hard I try.
This simple shift from observer to participant allows empathy to grow in the room.
2. The Wide Shot
Ask the group to imagine the scene as a film still. Who else should be here?
If someone says, “The parent who always complains,” or “The administrator who pressures us,” invite them to enter the image as that person.
The scene expands. The social context appears. We stop seeing a single frustrated teacher and start seeing the system that surrounds them.
3. Orchestra of Emotion
Each participant embodies the feeling of their character and finds a breath-based sound to match it.
The facilitator moves through the image, tapping one person at a time. A sigh, a hum, a growl, a whisper emerge and begin to layer.
The room becomes a living soundscape of emotion. It’s raw, sometimes uncomfortable, always revealing.
As the facilitator sequences these voices, a dialogue forms that no discussion could capture.
4. The Ideal Image
Invite an observer to reshape the frozen image into a new one that feels healthier, fairer, or more hopeful.
No one speaks. They simply move bodies. A bowed head is lifted. A student once ignored now faces the teacher.
Then, step back. Ask how it feels. Did every character make it to the ideal? Who resisted? Why?
Through the physical act of rearranging the image, participants see that change is not theoretical. It’s embodied.
5. Stepping into the Future or Past
Ask the group to move forward or backward in time. Each step, marked by a clap, becomes a new frozen picture.
They might discover how a conflict began. Or they might glimpse what happens if nothing changes.
This sequence allows teachers to explore cause, consequence, and choice in a way that written reflection never can.
6. Secret Thought
While the image holds still, touch each character on the shoulder. Ask them to speak their secret thought—the one thing they feel but would never say aloud.
A teacher might murmur, I’m afraid they don’t respect me. A student might confess, I stopped trying weeks ago.
These moments strip away the surface story and reveal what really drives behaviour in classrooms.
Each of these techniques opens a new door into understanding. They give voice to emotion, body to thought, and perspective to struggle. Most importantly, they remind us that teaching is not linear or tidy. It’s complex, human, and constantly shifting.
When a group of teachers works through these images together, something subtle happens. The old separation between “me” and “them” begins to fade. The classroom stops being a private battlefield and becomes a shared landscape of possibility.
Through these explorations, teachers don’t just analyse what happened. They rehearse what could happen next. They rehearse empathy. They rehearse courage. They rehearse transformation.
Forum Theatre doesn’t offer easy answers. It offers movement.
And in that movement, understanding begins.
If you’d like to explore these methods and see how they can deepen reflection, join our growing community of creative educators at Performative ELT. Together, we’re learning to feel, not just to reflect.
How do we move from talking about our challenges as teachers to seeing and feeling them in new ways?
In my Performative Pedagogy workshops, this shift happens through Image Theatre—a form of collaborative exploration where teachers bring their professional stories to life through body, space, and gesture. What begins as a personal reflection becomes a shared performance of understanding.
After participants have surfaced key emotional moments in their teaching lives, the group moves into what I call the Community Forum phase—a space for collective meaning-making. Here, shared experiences take shape as living scenes.
In small groups, teachers retell their individual challenges—moments of frustration, conflict, or doubt—while others listen with full attention and without judgment. The group then selects one story to explore more deeply. Crucially, the original storyteller steps back and becomes the facilitator, not the main actor. This small shift creates dramatic distance, allowing others to step into the story and reveal new perspectives.
The process begins with the group creating a frozen image that captures the emotional essence of the chosen story. These still images become powerful visual metaphors. They allow participants to notice posture, power, emotion, and relationships—what is spoken and unspoken in the classroom.
From there, the image gradually comes to life through short improvised scenes. A few simple techniques guide the process:
Touch and Tell – The facilitator touches a character in the frozen image; the character speaks one sentence in role.
Rewind and Play – The group re-enacts what led up to the frozen image.
Fast Forward – They improvise what might happen next.
Through these steps, teachers explore common yet deeply human themes: the unteachable class, the critical parent, the disappointing observation, the moment of burnout, the institutional roadblock.
The goal is not to find easy solutions but to uncover insight. Participants witness their stories from new angles. They see how small shifts in gesture, tone, or intention can transform a moment of tension into one of possibility.
In Image Theatre, re-enactment becomes rehearsal—a rehearsal for empathy, for courage, and for change. Teachers begin to realise that what happens in their classrooms and institutions is not fixed. It can be understood, reshaped, and even reimagined.
If this kind of embodied reflection speaks to you, join our growing community at Performative ELT—a space where teachers explore creative and performative approaches to teaching, share classroom experiments, and learn from one another. Together, we’re reimagining what it means to teach with presence, empathy, and artistry.
When teachers talk about the challenges they face, the conversation often stays in the realm of ideas — analysing what went wrong, what could have been better, or what strategies might help next time.
But what if, instead of talking about our experiences, we could embody them?
That’s the invitation at the heart of performative pedagogy — to move from analysis to embodiment, from thinking to feeling, from story to shape and sound.
The Power of Embodiment
In my workshops with teachers, we explore how emotion lives not just in our words, but in our gestures, posture, and breath. This isn’t about acting or performance in the theatrical sense. It’s about accessing a different kind of knowing — one that lives in the body and connects us to others on a deeper level.
When we let our bodies speak, they often tell truths our words have learned to censor.
The Circle Turn
One of my favourite activities to begin this process is something I call Circle Turn.
Step 1: Image Version
Participants stand in a circle and recall a significant emotional moment from their teaching life.
On the facilitator’s count, everyone turns inward and freezes in a pose that expresses that emotion.
They observe one another’s images and find others whose postures seem to express something similar.
Small groups form to share the stories behind those embodied images.
Reflect:
What did you notice about how your body held that emotion?
Did someone else’s shape resonate with your own story?
How did it feel to show rather than say what you felt?
The Sound of Emotion
The activity can then evolve from shape to sound.
Participants recall the same moment, but this time express it as a sound — using only the breath, not words.
On a shared count, everyone turns inward and lets that sound emerge.
The room fills with raw, human resonance — laughter, sighs, hums, even silence.
It’s extraordinary how quickly participants begin to connect. There’s recognition without explanation, empathy without analysis.
Why It Works
These embodied activities work because they bypass our intellectual filters. They allow emotion and meaning to surface from a deeper, more intuitive place. What emerges is not only personal awareness but also collective understanding.
When teachers share space in this way — physically, vocally, emotionally — something powerful happens:
Trust builds.
Awareness deepens.
The group begins to function as a community.
And that’s where transformation begins.
Beyond the Workshop
From these initial activities, we move towards Image Theatre and Community Forums, where individual experiences grow into collective stories of change. Teachers begin to see that they are more than minds managing lessons — they are whole people, with stories that live in their bodies.
When those stories are shared — visually, vocally, and collectively — a new kind of professional development becomes possible. One rooted not just in reflection, but in embodiment.
If this approach resonates with you, I invite you to join our free community Performative ELT — a space where educators explore embodied, creative, and performative ways of teaching and learning.
🟣 Join Performative ELT Discover workshops, discussions, and online courses designed to bring teaching to life — through story, image, sound, and movement.
At ITI Istanbul, we’re excited to announce the launch of our very first Hybrid CELTA course. This course is designed to give you the flexibility of online learning. It also combines the in-person energy of classroom teaching practice in beautiful Istanbul.
For many aspiring English language teachers, choosing between an online CELTA and a face-to-face CELTA is challenging. Online courses offer convenience and flexibility, while in-person courses provide an immersive experience and direct classroom interaction. Our new hybrid format gives you the best of both worlds.
How it works
Weeks 1–3: Online learning and teaching practice Start your CELTA journey from the comfort of your own home. You’ll engage in live interactive input sessions. You will collaborate with your peers. You will gain your first teaching experience online. All of this comes with the expert support of ITI’s internationally recognised CELTA tutors.
Weeks 4–5: Face-to-face immersion in Istanbul Then, it’s time to put your skills into practice in a real classroom environment. You’ll complete the final two weeks of your CELTA at our training centre in the heart of Istanbul, teaching real learners of English and developing your classroom presence with hands-on support from our experienced team.
Why choose the Hybrid CELTA?
Flexibility & Accessibility – Begin your training online, saving on travel and accommodation costs for the first three weeks.
Immersive Classroom Experience – Gain the essential on-line teaching skills and face-to-face teaching practice demonstrating to employers your added value.
Supportive Learning Community – Stay connected with your tutors and fellow trainees throughout the course – online and on-site.
Explore Istanbul – Combine your CELTA with the chance to experience one of the world’s most vibrant, historic, and multicultural cities.
Who is it for?
Whether you are starting your teaching career, looking for a professional qualification to open doors worldwide, or seeking to refresh your classroom skills, the Hybrid CELTA gives you the perfect balance of online flexibility and in-person experience.
Highly experienced team of Cambridge-approved trainers
A welcoming international learning community
The chance to join our global network of ITI alumni teaching across the world
The CELTA opens doors. The Hybrid CELTA opens them wider. Join us for this exciting new format and discover the best way to launch – or relaunch – your teaching career.
📅 Next course starts: 5th January online (26th January – 5th February in Istanbul) 📍 Location: Online + ITI Istanbul
I’ve run countless workshops for teachers over the years. Most of them go well—laughter, lively discussions, positive feedback. But there’s one exchange that stays with me:
Me:Did you enjoy the workshop?Participant:Oh yes, it was a lot of fun.Me:Would you use any of these activities in your classroom?Participant:(pause)Umm… no, I don’t think so.
This response isn’t rare. In fact, it’s remarkably common.
Teachers cite all sorts of reasons: 🕒 No time. 📘 Pressure to finish the syllabus. 👥 Classroom management issues. 🏫 Institutional expectations. 😕 Or simply, “It’s not really my style.”
But what matters most isn’t the reasons—it’s what they reveal: The workshop was enjoyable, but not applicable. It didn’t lead to change.
And that’s the paradox at the heart of so many traditional training sessions: We engage teachers in professional development that doesn’t meet them where they are.
It’s time we stop treating teachers as passive consumers of ready-made solutions. They are co-creators. And their professional learning should reflect that.
🎭 Facilitation as Expression and Empowerment
Facilitation isn’t just about keeping time or managing discussions. It’s an expressive craft. A skilled facilitator creates space for teachers to share openly, sit with uncertainty, and explore challenges without fear of judgement.
In Community Forums, facilitation becomes the engine of transformation. It’s not about giving answers—it’s about creating conditions where new insights can emerge. It’s about shared ownership, not top-down delivery.
🔄 From Trainer to Facilitator: A Brave Shift
Facilitating means stepping back. It means trusting participants to surface the issues that matter to them, and to make meaning together.
This takes courage—and it takes skill. That’s why Community Forums focus on building facilitation as a performative skillset:
🎧 Listening with presence ❤️ Responding with empathy 🌀 Guiding without directing 🌱 Holding space for growth
When we move from delivering content to co-creating experience, something powerful happens: Teacher development becomes real. Relevant. Human.
And that’s what it should be.
🌍 Want to explore this approach with like-minded educators?
Join my free online community: Performative ELT — a space for teachers, trainers, and teaching artists interested in embodied learning, facilitation, and drama-based approaches to professional development.
✨ Share your ideas ✨ Try out new techniques ✨ Be part of a movement redefining teacher education
👉 Join here and help us reimagine what teacher development can be.
What if professional development wasn’t something done to teachers—but something created by them?
That’s the idea behind Community Forums. It’s a powerful, participatory model. Educators come together to share experiences, reflect deeply, and explore solutions through performance.
A Different Workshop
Unlike traditional PD sessions that deliver top-down content, Community Forums are teacher-led, dialogic, and grounded in lived classroom experience. Inspired by the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire, these forums blend embodied learning with critical reflection.
In a Community Forum, we don’t just talk about teaching—we perform it.
Here’s how it works:
✅ Teachers bring their own stories—especially moments of tension or uncertainty. ✅ These “critical incidents” are re-enacted using movement, gesture, and improvisation. ✅ Participants step into each other’s roles, experiment with alternative actions, and uncover new perspectives.
This shift from talking to doing unlocks a deeper insight—one that’s felt, not just thought.
Why it matters:
🌀 It’s participant-led – Teachers shape the content.
🔍 It’s solution-focused – The goal is transformation, not just reflection.
🔁 It’s multi-voiced – All perspectives matter.
🎭 It’s embodied – We engage not just minds, but bodies and emotions too.
At its core, a Community Forum is a collective act of inquiry—and a space where teachers feel seen, heard, and empowered.
Not a Quick Fix—But a Real One
This isn’t a pre-packaged PD session. It takes time, vulnerability, and trust. But the rewards are immense: 💬 Stronger community 💡 Deeper insights 🔥 Renewed energy for the classroom
Curious to see what performative, teacher-led development can look like?
Let’s keep this conversation going.
🔗 Visit www.tom-godfrey.com for resources, videos, and upcoming workshops on Performative Pedagogy.
Why do so many teacher development workshops leave us feeling inspired… but unchanged?
You’ve been there: the presenter is engaging, the activities are fun, everyone’s laughing and nodding. But when it’s over and someone asks, “Will you actually use this?” — you hesitate. “It was interesting,” you say. “But it’s not really for me.”
Why the disconnect?
I believe it’s because real development can’t be handed to you in a slideshow. It has to come from you — your story, your voice, your body, your classroom challenges. That’s where performative pedagogy comes in.
Who Am I?
I’m Dr. Tom Godfrey — teacher, trainer, theatre director. For 40+ years I’ve worked with educators across the globe, helping them reconnect with the creative, embodied energy at the heart of teaching. What I’ve learned is this:
We don’t just teach with our heads. We teach with our whole selves.
That’s why we need new approaches to teacher development — approaches that are participatory, emotionally honest, and creatively alive.
What Is Performative Pedagogy?
It’s a way of teaching (and learning to teach) that sees the classroom as a space for human connection, not just content delivery. At its heart is something I call the Community Forum — a reflective, collaborative process grounded in applied theatre, inspired by the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire.
In these forums, teachers:
Share their real-life classroom struggles
Re-enact them with peers using image, movement, and voice
Explore new possibilities by stepping into each other’s shoes
Reflect together, not just to “fix” the problem, but to see it anew
This is more than just PD. It’s teacher development as transformation — embodied, relational, and deeply human.
📘 The Handbook (and What’s Next)
I’ve written a series of practical handbooks for teacher educators and facilitators who want to bring this approach into their work. It’s based on workshops I’ve delivered at our centre in Istanbul and online with teachers from around the world.
Tom Godfrey 